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Thursday, 12 March 2015

Useful Idiots: The Clueless Gooberism of First Look’s Fallen Heroes

Comment: Floyd writes about the wasted opportunity of the Greenwald-Snowden-inspired First Look Media (The Intercept) that was launched on a tidal wave of hyperbole and rhetoric whilst being funded by a corporate fascist like Pierre Omidya. As for ground-breaking articles and reports that would rock the Establishment...Well, they are no better or worse than any other, though it has given Greenwald a lion's share of Snowden cables and book deals to hatch under that carefully cultivated nest. --------------------------------

I don’t really want to go too far down the road on this when there
are far more important things happening in the world, but really, take
just a moment to look at the language in the Ken Silverstein piece on the world-historical tragedy of him finding out that it was less than ideal to work for a rapacious, dodgy billionaire:

“[Matt Taibbi] hired some incredible writers, including Alex Pareene,
Edith Zimmerman and other insanely talented people [for the
oligarch-funded vehicle called Racket] …. During my short time at
Racket, we talked about how we should have the courage to write whatever
we wanted—and not to worry about whether First Look management liked
what we did or whether we offended potential future employers. At
bottom, that is the true formula to produce fearless, independent
journalism. You will never produce fearless, independent journalism if
you live in fear of angering your media boss or to please your sources
or even your friends.”

I mean, just look at that phrasing. All of Silverstein’s pals at
racket were not just good journalists, they weren’t just talented
people; no, they had to be INSANELY talented. They were all (him
included) people endowed with talent beyond all normal measuring.

And then, in those deep, soulful conversations he reports having with
Taibbi and the other god-like creatures assembled at Racket,
Silverstein talks of the “fearless, independent journalism” (a phrase
repeated in two successive sentences) they were all courageously pledged
to create, no matter what the oligarch who was giving them tens of
millions of dollars might think.

But really: who on god’s green earth talks about themselves in this
way? Who beats their chests and shouts about how FEARLESS and
INDEPENDENT they are, how INSANELY TALENTED all their colleagues are?
Who, who actually was fearless and independent, would sign up
with a bloated billionaire techno-oligarch in the first place? And what
genuinely talented person needs to proclaim anxiously to all the world
how talented — sorry, not just talented but INSANELY talented — they and
their friends are?

And again, really: Alex Parene, INSANELY talented? You might, at a
stretch, say that Tolstoy or Shakespeare were INSANELY talented; that
is, that their talents seem to exceed those of most other writers. But
some guy who used to write pieces for Salon? He’s incomprehensibly
talented, is he? Couldn’t he be, like, just talented, or even less
hyperbolically, just a good writer? Is that not good enough?

And again, as with Glenn Greenwald, who famously declared that he
took no interest at all in Omidyar’s background or politics before he
took his multimillion dollar checks, Silverstein too declares that he
“knew little” about Omidyar when he took the oligarch’s money, and that
the oligarch — whatever he did or stood for — “wasn’t a big part of my
decision-making.”

Not to belabor the point, but again we are talking about
self-proclaimed FEARLESS INDEPENDENT journalists — Greenwald and
Silverstein — who freely admit that they did virtually no due diligence,
no FEARLESS investigation, of the oligarch who was waving fat wads of
money at them. They just took the money. And now we are supposed to feel
sorry for Silverstein and Taibbi and the other INSANELY TALENTED
FEARLESS INDEPENDENT JOURNALISTS who discovered that working on Petey’s
Farm was not the utopia they thought it would be. I suppose being
INSANELY TALENTED and FEARLESSLY INDEPENDENT doesn’t preclude you from
being MONUMENTALLY STUPID and WILFULLY IGNORANT. But such glaring
evidence of the latter does tend to tarnish somewhat one’s savvy,
dissident cred, does it not?

So what is the upshot of the whole Omidyar FUBAR? The end result has
been 1) to shut down for months on end some of the few ‘dissident’
writers able to publish in the mainstream media; and 2) undermine their
credibility and make them all look like stupid, self-aggrandizing,
money-grubbing goobers. If you had deliberately designed a scheme to
cripple the already minuscule portion of mildly oppositional stances
toward our militarist empire allowed to surface on the margins of the
national discourse, you could not have been more effective than the long
slow-motion train wreck of First Look Media.

Information Clearing House

Alison Weir / If Americans Knew...

The Corbett Report

Centre for Research on Globalisation

Signs of the Times

Photojournalism:

BOYCOTT ISRAEL

BREAK THE GATEKEEPERS

ARE YOU A CITIZEN OR A SUBJECT?

The inability to grasp the pathology of our oligarchic rulers is one of our gravest faults. We have been blinded to the depravity of our ruling elite by the relentless propaganda of public relations firms that work on behalf of corporations and the rich.

We need to remember that, psychopaths and other personality disordered individuals really have no choice but to be what they are; they are like forces of nature. But normal human beings DO have a choice as to whether they will accept abuse or not. By accepting abuse, they give power to the psychopaths to abuse others so it is not just a matter of self-preservation; it is a matter of making sure that our children have a future. It seems that, in a world where the people cannot or will not, rise up against psychopathy in power, the Cosmos will do it for them, and take them out as well for their silence and their weakness. The bottom line is, nobody and no event is going to “save” anyone. It is only human beings, individually and collectively, who have the power to BE salvation.” – Laura Knight-Jadczyk

Plans for control of the evil forces that have been loosed in the world, attempts to compensate the evil- doing by good works or sympathy for the victims, efforts to safeguard the peace or to effect ideal solutions of all the material problems involved, can do little to change the nature of the situation. The real problem, namely, the question of what can be done for civilization in face of the nonhuman forces arising from the collective unconscious in thousands or rather millions of individual persons, will remain untouched. However, if only one human being has met and solved the problem in himself, he will be a living demonstration of a solution. Such an individual carries with him the germ of a renaissance of the spiritual values of mankind.

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